Howling V: The Rebirth / Howling VI: The Freaks

Every purchase you make through these Amazon links supports DVD Verdict's reviewing efforts. Thank you!

All Rise...

The Charge

More fake fur than fashion week in new york!

The Case

A group of irritating invitees attends the grand reopening of a castle
condemned for its position on witchcraft and mass suicide five hundred years
before (seems every pencil neck behind the parapets offed his or her self to
protect an ancient secret recipe or something). After a splendid luncheon and an
unexpected blizzard (yeah, right!), they find themselves trapped inside the
tenement turrets without a means of contacting the outside world, or a plot to
make their predicament interesting. One by one, ancient Agatha Christie style,
we whittle our way down to some sort of crappy conclusion. Apparently, an unseen
force is doing a little corporeal palace cleaning and non-descript Eurotrash
cast members are part of the "Honey Do" list. As one-dimensional
dimwit after single celled acting amoeba disappear from our derivative detective
story, we begin to wonder just what all this Ten Little Indians imitation tripe has
to do with werewolves. Turns out this citadel was once the home to a race of
full moon fans. Now, the last remaining cursed cur is trying to escape. Or kill
off the rest of his kinfolk. Or open up a tourist trap (it's never really
clear). Eventually, the character least likely to be a vulpine is
exposed—maybe—for the audience, and just like the ultra ambiguous
ending, we are all left to ponder what exactly The Howling V: The Rebirth
means.

Then, in one of those backwater burgs where one person owns all the
land and the financial fortunes of the rest of the population are teetering
between trailer and white trash, a proper English bloke named Ian shows up.
Naturally, his calm kind of Caucasian supremacy is not appreciated around these
here boondocks. But somehow, he manages to get bed and board at a decrepit
church and before long, he is sanding, priming, and painting like a less
masculine Genevieve Gorder. Eventually, the whole town thinks he's pretty
peachy, but our bandsaw wielding Brit has a horrible secret to hide and it has
something to do with a carnival freak show that saunters into town like a
freelance hooker on Federal farm subsidy payday. Run by the tall, slickly
temperate Mr. Harker, everything from deformed feti in a jar to a really lame
drag performer can be viewed at his cavalcade of human oddities. But Harker too
has a mysterious air, and it's not the leftover funk from the alligator boy's
sawdust pit. He wants Ian, and oddly, Ian has a non-gay thing for him. See, Ian
is the ultimate freak, and it's not because he enjoys a good steak and kidney
pie. He's the last remaining werewolf from a family of same stalked and enslaved
by Harker over the years. See, Harkie is…well…he's a…demon
sorta…vampire ghoul…thingie. Anyway, both of our supernatural
swishers duke it out in a battle royale to see who will wear the crown of cud
called The Howling VI: The Freaks.

When is a werewolf movie almost not a werewolf movie? When it's
called either The Howling V: The Rebirth or The Howling VI: The
Freaks. These lying, light on the lycanthrope lug nuts wouldn't know a good
shapeshifter if it took a whiz on their wainscoting. These faux films are so far
removed from Joe Dante's delightful deconstruction of the genre that a safe
system for traveling such long unoriginal distances has yet to be devised by man
or alien race. Heck, when compared to the butt and boob bonanza of Sybil
Danning's sexed up Howling II, you'd still have to traverse a few
galaxies before you'd land at the rote, rotten doorsteps of these made-for-video
VD voids. Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to twist a tired formula into
something new, or even milking a franchise to within one micron of its potential
worth. But the maniacal merchandisers of the Howling monopoly are utterly
insane. These people have never met a bad idea that they won't embrace outright.
A typical pitch meeting with these miscreants must go something like this:

"Hey, Mr. X. Why don't we make a Howling movie
where…um…where the werewolves come back to life…as,
um…disco divas in an all male strip club?" "SOLD!" "Hey, Mr. X. What if we set an entire Howling film inside the rotting
spleen of a dying billy goat?" "Could it be an infected rhesus
monkey?" "Um…yeah, sure." "SOLD!"

It's the only way to explain how such hackneyed ideas as the ones offered
here ever got connected to the traditional skin-walker canon. The wolfman (or
lady) is a noble paranormal creature. To treat it like a prop in some
incompetent's unexplainable fever dream is truly unfair.

The Howling V, for example, could easily have substituted a
unbalanced yak or an out-for-revenge reindeer for its main manimal killer since
(a) we see very little of the beast onscreen and (b) it would make about as much
sense as the ancient, cursed wolf creature championed here. Like Demons, where a bunch of retards are
trapped in a movie theater with an ever-increasing population of pissed off
pixies, our castle keep challenger is supposed to produce a lot of intense
suspense and gory dread, but all we get are reams of exposition, secondary
subplot stupidity, and a confusing conclusion that merely hints at who or what
was responsible for all the off-screen killings. Frankly, a film that is relying
on the flesh ripping skill of its monster to scare your skorts off shouldn't be
hiding its horror outside the frame.

Not that Howling VI is all that more revelatory. More concerned with
telling its carnival barker bunkum than giving us gallons of guts and gullet
garroting, this movie is a make-up effects feast fouled by a wickedly weak
screenplay. Indeed, all the creature work (save the sorry title terror) is first
rate. Too bad it's forced to take a Bunsen burner to some excruciating attempts
at local color, an ever increasing-in-its-obnoxiousness dream sequence, and
heaps of hambone acting. Such once-were-somebodies like Carol Lynley and Antonio
"Huggy Bear" Fargas might allow one the assumption that there is a
modicum of professionalism to found here, but outside Bruce Payne's enigmatic
turn as Harker (he's so mellow he's almost inert), everyone else is groping
around looking for a clue. Unfortunately, The Howling VI isn't
contributing one anytime soon.

As paltry as the offerings are within the films themselves, nothing can
compare to the paucity provided by Artisan as part of this so-called DVD double
feature. Sure, they give you two totally trashpile movies for the price of one.
And the shiny surface of the disc itself, when held up to the sun just right,
makes a wonderfully fun reflective play toy for your pet cat. But there is
nothing else of substance on this digital offering to make it worth your
pecuniary proclivity. The full screen transfers on both films are compressed,
grainy, and very soft. The Dolby Digital Stereo Surround is impressive in name
only. And there is not a single bonus feature, not even a set of subtitles, to
wrap your impulse buying around. So unless the notion of an empty offering of
bad films alone makes your wallet leap with elation, skip The Howling V: The
Rebirth and The Howling VI: The Freaks. No matter how many times it
reinvents or reincarnates itself, these sad sequel excuses will never be
acceptable: not by horror fans or werewolf enthusiasts. Even the human oddities
in Tod Browning's ode to the unusual would have a hard time chanting
"gooble gobble one of us."

Give us your feedback!

Did we give Howling V: The Rebirth / Howling VI: The Freaks a fair trial? yes / no

What's "fair"? Whether positive or negative, our reviews should be unbiased, informative, and critique the material on its own merits.